


someday we’ll try to walk upright

by owlinaminor



Category: In the Flesh (TV)
Genre: Character Study, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-19
Updated: 2019-11-19
Packaged: 2021-02-12 23:01:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,241
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21484261
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/owlinaminor/pseuds/owlinaminor
Summary: What do you believe, Simon Monroe?
Relationships: Simon Monroe/Kieren Walker
Comments: 1
Kudos: 33





	someday we’ll try to walk upright

**Author's Note:**

> rewatched in the flesh w/ my girlfriend recently (or, well, rewatch for me, first watch for her). that shit _holds up._
> 
> i made a [twitter poll](https://twitter.com/owlinaminor/status/1196564510095613953) to decide the title of this fic and of course it tied, so the title is from [damn these vampires](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a2P3lF47ml8) by the mountain goats but the epigraph is from ["why is god love, jack?"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kt5dQaGWBxg) by allen ginsberg.

> _WHY IS GOD LOVE, JACK?_
> 
> _Because wrapped with machinery  
I confess my ashamed desire._

What do you believe, Simon Monroe?

1.

Clothes. You believe in clothes. Putting on a suit and tie is easy, it comes more naturally than the makeup ever did. You always wanted to be in drama when you were younger, you used to toddle around the kitchen waving a cardboard sword and reenact Greek tragedies with your cousins at Christmas. This is the same: loop a tie around your neck, pull the knot tight, and you are a disciple of the Undead Prophet. Easy enough after that to comb your hair back, pitch your voice down low, smile and spread your arms.

Clothes buttoned up tight, let go slack, weighted down, used as an anchor to pull you into a kiss. He says _come meet my family,_ and you are a marionette on a string, a moon in a gravitational field. Spinning.

_Nice jeans,_ you tell his dad. His mum has a nice sweater but that compliment gets caught in your throat, in the way she smiles at you, almost as though you are welcome. You know how to do this. You do. Then why are your hands shaking as you pass the salt?

_Don’t let anyone see me like this,_ you tell him. Not in the makeup, not behind the curtain. Who the hell is Oz, anyway.

2.

Hands. You believe in hands. The rough wool of a sweater between your thumb and your index finger, the sweater your mother gave you for your birthday. She didn’t knit it herself even though she bought a book and ten different types of yarn and needles, silver and sharp. She only pricked herself. This one is from a store: stitches tight and even. You pull at the seams, stretching the arms, until it goes ragged.

The rough wool of a sweater, the rough skin of your father’s palm as he takes your hand in the treatment center. He’s warm. Too warm. Like touching a pot on a hot stove, molecules in the metal dancing furiously. You almost pull back, but that would signal fear, wouldn’t it, and you’re not supposed to be afraid. Fear belongs to them.

Hands curled around blankets, around phone cords, around steering wheels. Wet around a washcloth pressed to his face. You think of rivers, of blessings, of benedictions, but then he looks at you and you only press closer. Too hot even though his skin is plaster and yours is porcelain, waiting to be cracked.

3.

Words. You believe in words. The inscription on a tombstone, two lines of verse or a clipping from the Bible, cut into a slab of rock and traced by a cool finger, maybe a few tears. That is what it means, to give words weight. To bring them into the real world, to let them sink like limestone beneath the earth, today’s slow-dripping tears will build tomorrow’s monuments.

Words are heaviest in tombstones, lighter in ink. A message from the Prophet, or from Shakespeare. Pilgrim’s hands, pilgrim’s lips. Romeo and Juliet had to be in love, you always thought so, or else what was the point. You spot the volume on his bookshelf, caught between _Leaves of Grass_ and a book of Van Gogh paintings, and ask if he’s read it. He smiles, and opens it easily to a dog-eared page, and begins to read aloud. Benvolio holding Mercutio, nodding blindly as he curses. _That gallant spirit hath aspired the clouds, which too untimely here did scorn the earth._

If you got a tattoo, you wonder—if you inked his words into your skin, would it heal? Or would it bleed as long as you do, stitches fraying?

4.

Belief. You believe in belief. _I’m ready to follow, _you told the Prophet, but that was not quite right.

When you were fifteen years old you found a copy of Allen Ginsberg’s _Howl and Other Poems_ in the back of a bookstore, tucked on a discount vintage shelf above Langston Hughes and below Emily Dickinson. You opened it and found a poem about a sunflower_—we’re not our skin of grime, we’re not our dread bleak dusty imageless locomotive, we’re all beautiful golden sunflowers inside, we’re blessed by our own seed—_and you sat down there, right there on the dusty floor, and read the little book front to back and back again. Whispering the words to yourself just so that they could pass through your lungs. Oxygen to carbon dioxide and back again. Your father found you, two hours later, knees curled up to your chest, just whispering, _I’m putting my queer shoulder to the wheel, _like if you bit into the consonants enough times they would stay there, beneath your gums.

_There’s what I believe, and then there’s you,_ you tell him, but that is not quite right either. You touch him, and you are back in that bookshop, and you are back in that telephone booth, and you are back on the operating table, remembering what it means to look at light and process it. Oxygen to carbon dioxide. Light to cornea to retina to image in the brain. Belief and the way it settles, habitual, the way it sinks beneath your skin from a revelation to a way of life.

5.

Him. You believe in him. Kieren Walker. Three days after the graveyard you come to him shaking, you kneel at the foot of his bed and put your head in his lap and tell him, you tell him everything, it pours from you like the Thames or the Atlantic or the fucking Flood. Forty days and forty nights.

_I almost,_ you say. The words are almost unrecognizable: choked, bitten-off. _I almost._

He does not say anything for a long time. His hands go to your hair, stroking softly, and you want so badly to feel it, and you remember his quaking form in the meadow, his hands on his father’s shoulders, his eyes carrying the weight of the sky. _I don’t want to hurt anyone._

_You almost,_ he says finally, lifting your face gently and holding you, his thumbs at your cheeks. _But you didn’t. You wouldn’t have._

You want to cry at the easy way he says it, unencumbered. You want to climb inside his chest and build an arc.

_Kieren,_ you say instead.

He falls back against the bed and pulls you with him. Then he turns, anchoring you, one of his hands going up to trace the bullet hole between your shoulder blades. He is porcelain in the moonlight, or you are, and you can’t think of any poetry big enough or heavy enough so you kiss him.

_Kieren,_ Steve calls from somewhere beneath you. _Keep the door open._

_Jesus Christ, Dad!_ Kieren yells back, and then he’s laughing, and then you are, and then you think maybe this is it, maybe this is the Second Rising, or maybe this is something greater. A circle of moonlight, a pair of hands meeting, an exchange of oxygen between still-quiet lungs.

6.

<strike>Yourself. You believe in yourself.</strike>

<strike>You believe in your—</strike>

<strike>You believe—</strike>

You are trying to believe in yourself.

Kieren says, that Amy would say, that a few dozen strolls through the forest and dances in the rain will do it. You aren’t so sure, but he smiles at you and anchors you, and you’re willing to give it a go.

**Author's Note:**

> other references: shakepeare's _romeo & juliet,_ I.v. and III.i.; ginsberg's _howl and other poems,_ "sunflower sutra" and "america." the big long in the flesh fic i wrote back in my senior year of high school is referential as hell and it seemed only fitting to pay homage to that here.
> 
> talk to me on [twitter.](https://twitter.com/owlinaminor)


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